NEW YORK — Deep, imperious and thundering with an angry irony, the voice precedes the man. When it first tears through the darkness, amplified to eardrum-rattling volume, you sense a collective quickening of pulses at the Daryl Roth Theater, where a somber and monotonous new variation on “Cyrano de Bergerac” opened Thursday night.
NEW YORK — They’re speaking more softly in Richard Nelson’s Rhinebeck these days, as if a raised voice might upset a tenuous balance. Not that any of the previous seven (and wonderful) family dramas written by Nelson during the past nine years, all set in the Hudson River town of Rhinebeck, New York, have ever involved much shouting.
NEW YORK — It’s raining metaphors in “for all the women who thought they were Mad,” Zawe Ashton’s densely poetic play about racial alienation in the big city. As to whether it’s actually raining — or burning hot, with a sun that sears the skin — is a moot point in this production, which opened Sunday at Soho Rep.
NEW YORK — A lot of what’s being said on the stage of the Vineyard Theater these days is maddeningly ordinary — the kind of friendly, vapid conversation you might exchange with a stranger in a grocery store line. Yet every word spoken, no matter how banal, seems to stretch your nerves closer to snapping.
NEW YORK — You thought tropical storms were disruptive? The Italian Americans living along the Gulf Coast in the Roundabout Theater Company’s untethered revival of Tennessee Williams’ “The Rose Tattoo” are really up against the elements, and so are the actors playing them.
NEW YORK — The everyday poison known as toxic masculinity becomes dangerously easy to swallow in “Linda Vista,” Tracy Letts’s inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy. In the sunny opening scenes of this very funny, equally unsettling Steppenwolf Theater production — which opened on Thursday at the Hayes Theater — you’ll probably feel like cozying up to that sheepish, disheveled big guy who rules the stage with his outspoken wit.
NEW YORK — A promising buzz of suspense stirs the opening moments of “The Wrong Man,” Ross Golan’s solemn new chamber musical, which opened Wednesday at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space in Manhattan. A lone, ominous whistle; a searchlight raking the darkness; a throng of tense-bodied men and women looking furtive — such gratifyingly classic notes of noir are sounded before a single word is sung.
NEW YORK — It all begins with a man in a hole. Or rather, it begins with the hole itself, which occupies the center — dead center, I should say — of the screen that fills the stage at NYU’s Skirball Center.
NEW YORK — Even within the gruesome history of torture and execution devices, it ranks as a thing of unspeakable cruelty — a harrow that punctures the skin of the convicted prisoner by writing the crime of which he has been accused on the surface of his naked body, over and over again.
NEW YORK — The woman who dreams of flying has made a prison of her life. Portrayed with an impassive mien and a wounded gaze by Sabina Zúñiga Varela, the heroine of Luis Alfaro’s spirited, mournful “Mojada” is first seen holding two outsize tropical leaves as if they were wings, like a bird about to take off.
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — These are eyes you could truly get lost in, and probably never emerge from. They belong to the title character of “Acquanetta,” a spine-tingling chamber opera by Michael Gordon and Deborah Artman at Bard SummerScape festival. And when you first see them, you’ll probably have no idea what they are.
As for Jesus, he’s not even name-checked, except in Latin at the very beginning. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be surprising, however anachronistic, to hear psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung mentioned with holy reverence.
Might I still put in a word, though, for the sheer, idiotic delight of watching the fatally quarrelsome lawmakers now in session at the Wild Project in the East Village? As might be expected, they are all old white men — centuries old, in fact — who are as ineffectual as they are talky.
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
